Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Ooo, I might even see if I can watch the 20th anniversary special. Haven't watched it for years, but put in some bursts as an extra way back in the day (i.e. probably about the same time you wrote that editorial).
Things I learnt as an extra:
- Craig Parker and Angela Dotchin were snobs, but Temuera Morrison and Rene Naufahu weren't. 'Course, by snobs, I mean "ignored extras as though we were self-propelled props, rather than talking to us as people", which is a pretty narrow definition. They may be perfectly lovely in other settings.
- Andrew Binns was much hotter in person than he was on screen.
- There's no glamour in a 6am start on the North Shore when you live in Kingsland and don't drive. -
OnPoint: To Whom it May Concern, in reply to bmk,
home-grown tobacco ... tastes foul compared to the commercial stuff
Yep. Pretty hard to get your home-grown stuff to taste like the commercial stuff unless you have a pharmacopoiea of additives available.
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I don't think a thread has made me quite so homesick in a while, and I don't even live in Auckland. Oh Moore Wilsons, how we miss it! But only 136 days left till we're back in its scented aisles. In the meantime we console ourselves with the cheapness and easy availability of good chorizo and ... no, that's about it. My only tip is that you can buy proper-sized bottles of Kikkoman (instead of the miserable 250ml ones that are all you'll find in a supermarket) at Loon Fung Supermarket near Leicester Square. It's not local, and it's not cheap, and I had to carry the 5L bottle (they were out of 1L on my first visit) in my backpack 3km home on foot from the railway station, including a section up one of the few truly steep hills roads in England, but some things are worth hard work.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Matthew Poole,
That it and the living-costs component of a student loan are mutually exclusive says everything about their roles: they're there so you can live while studying, not so that you don't have to find other sources of funding for your study.
Well, sure, and I never said otherwise. I'm not sure exactly why you're arguing with me about it though. My original point was that even if you receive a student allowance for 200 weeks, you're still likely to have some student loan as well at the end of it.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Matthew Poole,
Doesn't work like that. If you're getting the student allowance you're not allowed to draw down living costs on your student loan.
No, but you can still get a loan for fees and course-related costs, as there's unlikely to be allowance money left over after living costs to cover those things.
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Darn, too late for edit... I meant to add - the financial "advantage" meant to compensate for the financial disadvantage of their starting point.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
They have been seeing, during the student loan era, a shift in the quality of students taking the sciences. these are really bright kids who stand out in the stage I classes (yes lecturers do notice). When they talk to those kids they simply say they'd love to do biology/chemistry/maths but they won't because they want to be able to pay off their loans.
I can see how the introduction of student loans (and fees at the same time) could have made that kind of difference. It takes a whole lot of altruism (though not necessarily humility, apparently...) and perhaps a small amount of self-indulgence to decide to study anthropology rather than law when you're going to have to pay off a whacking great loan at the end of it either way. But I don't see a small change in the repayment regime changing that a whole lot.
I had misunderstood Keith's post as meaning that the student allowance limit had been reduced, but I see now he's just raging against the fact it's 200 weeks full stop, rather than that it's been reduced. As far as that goes, yes, it's rubbish. It's particularly rubbish because it's 200 weeks of allowance, not 200 weeks of study. So let's say you start university straight out of high school at 18, and you do +/- 200 weeks of study, which is generally about 5 years, so you're now 23. You decide to work for a couple of years and then go back to do graduate or post-graduate study. So you work for a couple of years and you're now 25.
For those from really wealthy families, they have no student loan (because the parentals paid for everything) and they're now eligible for a student allowance because they're over 24, so no longer means-tested on their parents income.
For those from the middle classes, they've probably clocked up a solid-sized loan (which they won't have made much dent in over the two years working), but they're also now eligible for the student allowance.
But for those from poorer backgrounds, they've now used up their student allowance. They've probably also got a bit of a loan, because the allowance isn't exactly gravy. They're no better off relative to their middle-class classmates than they were at 18, because they've been studying for most of the time since then, and a year of two of working isn't going to have made much difference to their net wealth. But in order to do that graduate or post-graduate study, they're going to have to make that loan bigger. And they're apparently more debt-shy than their middle-class classmates, so less inclined to take on the loan.
So in sum, the 200-week limit reduces the financial "advantage" of those who were eligible for loans at 18, compared to those who weren't. Not exactly a "closing the gaps" type policy then.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
And that means they won't become ecologists or biologists or theoretical mathematicians or analytical chemists or god forbid any of the Arts. Instead they will all choose to be lawyers or economists and similar professions where salary ramps up fast and high. Note these are the brightest they won't be mere clerks.
I disagree.
1. The brightest students have always been able to choose between careers which will pay well, and careers which they will find intellectually or socially rewarding (not that they're necessarily mutually exclusive), and they have always been making that choice. Sure, the economics of it just got slightly worse, but the idealistic young will still go into areas they think matter. If they weren't idealistic they'd be doing law and economics or civil engineering anyway.
2. Indeed, I wouldn't mind seeing a few more idealistic youth going into civil engineering; they might encourage their classmates to think about the world in a different way.
3. The percentage of students eligible for student allowances is pretty small, and the percentage of those who'd want to do post-grad study even smaller. On numbers (rather than percentages of each group), most of the best and brightest aren't eligible for allowances anyway.
4. The true best and brightest get scholarships for post-graduate study, and will be reasonably confident of their ability to do so.N.B. This doesn't mean that I think limiting the allowance to 200 weeks is a good idea. It just means that I don't think it will have much impact on the study decisions of the brightest students.
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Ooo, I forgot to add that there is some music that I hate that's not because of PTSD.
REM. All of it, all of the time.
I think it's the lead singer's voice that does it, but I've never stuck with it long enough to be sure. -
Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to JacksonP,
It's the repetition that does it, mostly. I had a holiday job in an ice cream parlour which played two discs on random scramble all day: "best of" compilations for Madonna, and Roy Orbison. Now I've mostly recovered my previous enjoyment of Madonna (except for "Holiday", which still brings me out in a rash). But Roy Orbison, nooooooo. Particularly "Crying" and "Only the Lonely". I shudder to remember them.
Also, my childhood included the pyschological torture of being dragged along to far too many of my stepfather's band practices. Although he is (and was then too) a very skilled musician, and his bandmates were too, listening to band practice is not like listening to music. You get a few bars maybe, and then a "hey, how about we try that again, but change that bit", or "oh I didn't get that bit right, can we try that again." It really is water torture, with the unpredictability of the stops and starts being like the unpredictability of the water drops falling.
The even worse consequence of this torture is that I can't listen to anything that has that late 70s kiwi rock sound, or live bands. I can just about do big concerts, because the mixing makes it more like listening to recorded music. But I can't do live bands in pubs. They make me want to hit somebody.